A reader and writer fooling with words

Jacquerie – the Jacks are revolting

This week’s word is jacquerie which I came across in Richard Killeen’s excellent “A Timeline of Irish History”. I’d highly recommend it for any student of Irish history or historic fiction writer as it gives a clear rundown of the key events in Irish history from 8000 BC to 1970 AD in a little over a hundred pages – no mean feat.

Killeen was talking about an insurrection in 1641 in Ulster which became a jacquerie against the plantation of the region. Plantation in this case having little to do with crops and more to do with importing settlers who would be loyal to the crown and giving them land regardless of current occupants. The uprising resulted in thousands of settlers being killed and lasted for more than a year.

But what is a jacquerie? Of obvious French origin, the term denotes a peasant’s revolt. The original jacquerie began in northern France in 1358 with peasants rising against their nobles during the Hundred Year War. Jacques was seen as a typical French peasant’s name and hence named the uprising they caused. Plus the jacket worn by the peasants was called a jacque and their doomed leader Guillaume Cale was nicknamed Jack Goodfellow (Jacque Bonhomme) by the chronicler of the event.

Defeat of the Jacquerie“Jacquerie meaux” by Jean Froissart

The jacquerie was put down with brutal force within a couple of months but no doubt the idea of a spontaneous peasant uprising shook the nobles. It took another four hundred years for France to become a republic during the French Revolution.

Until next time as French ladder-carriers say – “mind your head, we’re going to have a revolution”,

Grace

p.s. just to prove that entering a writing contest even when you know there will be hundreds of entries is always worth a go – I made it into the top ten of the 2015 RTE/Penguin Ireland short fiction prize with “Seeing Clearly” a story I wrote this April during CampNaNo. I’m surprised and delighted in equal measure and can’t wait to attend the publishing day in September which is my runner-up prize.